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Wilson’s in 1918 isn’t clear yet. And one of the reasons for the epidemic policy failure in was that it was illegal to say anything critical about the U.S. government – which in turn lied and obscured the truth. Fortunately, it’s not illegal to tell the truth today in the U.S. (yet, at least). And so I’ll continue to criticize as I see fit. I don’t think anyone wants 2.1 million Americans to die. The poorly provisioned health care system is a result of running it as a for-profit enterprise... No wasted capital on inventory. No excess bed capacity. Buy and close the competing hospitals. – John Y. Kim Iskyan comment: John – as I wrote on March 6, the American health care system is uniquely designed to promote the spread of COVID-19. You have to pay to get tested – and for the 14% of the population has no health insurance, and the many tens of millions more who have lousy health insurance, that’s a big reason to not get tested. (And, meanwhile, potentially infect lots of other people.) And if you test positive, treatment (and hospitalization) could be financially catastrophic – especially for those 49% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. However. I think free enterprise needs to be the driver of health care. Market incentives are the grease of efficiency.
World War I in that it required the services of physicians, thus taking them away from civilian hospitals] was the government policy toward the truth... When the United States entered the war, [President] Woodrow Wilson... created the Committee on Public Information, which was inspired by an adviser who wrote, ‘Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms... The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.’” The Sedition Act, passed by Congress in May 1918 at Wilson’s urging, made saying anything bad about the U.S. government punishable with prison time. The main aim of that was to discourage any bad news about World War I, and it had severe implications for the spread of the flu. The article explains, “Against this background, while influenza bled into American life, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie.” Around 670,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu. Adjusted for population size, that’s equivalent to about 2.1 million people today. And the U.S. got off easy... a total of 20 million to 50 million people worldwide died of the Spanish Flu. That would be equivalent to somewhere between 86 million to 215 million people dying... or, at the lower end, the combined populations of California, Florida, and Texas. One of the key jobs of a government is, at the most basic level, to protect its people. Whether the current government in the U.S. is failing as catastrophically as Woodrow
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April 2020
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